Is It All or Nothing?

Mike Leigh insinuates that Hollywood is a 'disease', keeping directors from presenting real life through cinema. The contrast between European cinema as Leigh describes it and American film is that European films are about the real lives of real people, whereas in American film there is a lack of reality. American film producers produce movies that will entertain the masses for the purpose of turning a profit, and American film producers know that social realism is not exactly entertaining. The stories they tell are very fantastic and unrealistic, obvious jokes are made to make the audience laugh, melodrama is exaggerated, suffering is glorified, colorful characters populate the film, and will usually include an all star cast to convince people that the movie must be good if all these celebrities star in it. One example that comes to mind is He's Just Not That Into You, which includes Jennifer Aniston, Jennifer Connelly, Justin Long, Scarlet Johansson, Ben Affleck, Kevin Connolly, and Drew Barrymore playing major characters, and they make sure in advertisements that we all know this. The movie itself is also predictable, with relationship complications, miscommunication, the lighthearted humor common in romantic comedies, and the happy ending in which everything works itself out. Even when a movie is 'based on a true story', many thematic elements are added to the story so that it'll have a comprehensible plot with a beginning, middle, and end.

However, American film producers do have the capacity to create a film that represents events happening realistically, without added drama or an obvious motive for swaying the audience to think one way. The HBO film Taking Chance is an example.



This film is about Marine Chance Phelps, who died in the Iraq war, and the events surrounding his return to the United States and his burial. The film doesn't make it a point to heighten drama or poorly conceal a political message, but rather just tells the story as it happened.

Despite this, it's fair to say Hollywood is a disease. It diseases American cinema as well as American minds. If we grow up watching films that provoke emotional responses as opposed to thought, we will be accustomed to such films and demand them from Hollywood, hence completing the cycle. People do not expect the films they watch to make them 'think', so therefore Hollywood does not churn out one intellectual film after the other. What could potentially be a form of art turns into a business.

Many Americans, however, do have an understanding of what makes a film a really bad film. The best examples of this are the parody films created by the two writers from Scary Movie. The jokes they make in their films do not have much to do with the genre they're parodying anymore; they are just inserting jokes for the sake of putting them there, and the jokes are not very funny. Most people I have met agree that those movies are awful and insult their intelligence. The Hollywood disease can be contagious to the viewer, depending on their amount of exposure to Hollywood movies and how suceptable they are. Although it's clear not everyone has caught it, Hollywood still festers with it.